#nvidia

#nvidia

Billionaire Peter Thiel runs the hedge fund Thiel Macro and is known for playing a significant role in identifying growth stocks. Based on the recent 13F filing, Thiel sold his entire stake in artificial intelligence (AI) giant NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and reinvested the proceeds in Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). While not everyone will agree with the move to abandon NVIDIA Corp. the other AI giants, Microsoft and Apple, are well positioned to benefit from the AI revolution and have made significant gains in the past few years.

Lee and I both agreed that few investors fully appreciate how central SoftBank has become to the global AI capital stack. The company owns stakes in OpenAI, has backed emerging infrastructure projects like the Trump-aligned Stargate initiative, and effectively repositioned itself as the Berkshire Hathaway of AI by reallocating its Nvidia profits into higher-risk frontier plays. Yet unlike traditional cash-rich tech giants, SoftBank must borrow to fund its commitments. That leverage profile is now front and center.

The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1955, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies. Gold provided the motivation for California a former Mexican territory then controlled by the US military to become a state with laws of its own.

Nvidia's sterling armor was dented this month. After years of meteoric success, the chipmaker and its CEO Jensen Huang have increasingly found themselves playing defense - an unusual position for the company. Nvidia headed into the month with its stock price at an all-time high, bolstered by increasing AI spending from some of its major Big Tech customers like Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Speaking at an all-hands meeting last Thursday, the day after the chipmaker reported another quarter of record results, Huang reacted sharply to reports that some managers inside the company were urging teams to dial back their AI use. Business Insider listened to the meeting. "My understanding is Nvidia has some managers who are telling their people to use less AI," Huang said. "Are you insane?"

This morning, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced September retail sales data, which showed sales began slowing even before the government shutdown through the economy for a loop. Sales increased 0.2% in September nationwide, slower than August's 0.6% gain. Worse, essentially all the increase in September "sales" came in the form of price hikes on products. Prices rose 0.3% in the month, and if you back out that increase, shopping-sales actually declined 0.1%.

GPU giant Nvidia acknowledged that the update caused dips in gaming performance for some and has pushed out a hotfix based on version 581.80 of its Game Ready Driver. First spotted by Windows Latest, the hotfix is a quick and dirty (or, in official parlance, "run through a much abbreviated QA process") patch to address some specific issues. In this case, the Windows 11 October update is slowing down games.